Times-Union columnist Mark Woods, circa the mid-1960s, picking a tree with his father, Rex Woods. (This photo was taken somewhere in Michigan. The story is about the memories created by cutting your own trees - something we did every year when I was a little older and the Wisconsin church where my dad was minister had a tree farm. This photo, I believe, was at a corner tree lot, not a cut-your-own farm. But it can illustrate some of the story - my dad's love of trees and how we used to tromp through snow to get one.)

Bruce.Lipsky@jacksonville.com--12/21/13--The Broskey boys, Cameron, 12, (L-R) Hunter, 9 and Dalton, 6, kneeling with dad Michael, cut a 7 1/2 foot Leyland Cypress tree at Songer's. This was the 11th year the Broskeys cut a tree at Songer's. Families made the trip to Songer's Christmas Tree Farm to cut their own tree on Saturday, December 21, 2013 in Clay County west of Middleburg. (Florida Times-Union/Bruce Lipsky)

You would think I could remember what I found under the Christmas tree as a child. Not everything. But maybe a gift or two I desperately wanted, like Ralphie and his Red Ryder BB gun in “A Christmas Story.”

When I try to come up with something similar, I get only vague memories of toy cars, sports equipment, sweaters, board games and 8-track tapes. What I do remember vividly isn’t something that was under the Christmas tree.

It is the tree itself.

I can close my eyes and smell it, feel the prickle of its needles, see the ornaments hanging from its branches and imagine my parents, my two sisters and our dog gathering around it.

According to the American Christmas Tree Association, more than 94 million American households will wake up Christmas morning with some sort of tree in their home. About 80 percent artificial, 20 percent real.

If you do a Google search for the history and meaning of Christmas trees, you’ll find all types of tales of pagan festivals and Christian traditions. Ancient Romans decorating evergreen trees with small pieces of metal. Martin Luther bringing a pine tree inside and lighting it with candles. Thomas Edison preventing many a future fire by lighting one with a string of electric bulbs.

But if you do an old-fashioned search — head to a tree farm in the weeks before Christmas — you’ll find explanations and anecdotes that inevitably come back to more recent and more personal history.

There are a half dozen choose-and-cut Christmas tree farms in North Florida. In the balmy days of December 2013, I visited a few of them and found, among other things, a man who looks an awful lot like Santa, a woman named Fraser (like the fir) and a 9-year-old boy who seems to already know what it took me years to figure out. The most memorable part of Christmas isn’t what’s under the tree.

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Take Lem Turner Road and head toward Nassau County. On the way, you pass a Walmart where you could easily stop to get a tree, but keep going. Past where the road narrows to two country lanes, past Bee Pa’s honey stand, past some trees that actually have hints of autumnal colors, before eventually veering onto a sandy road.

If you use your imagination, and ignore the thermometer that says it’s 79 degrees outside, the sand almost resembles plowed snow. Near the end of the road, close to Four Creeks State Forest, a sign says Christmas trees. This is Gustafson’s Tree Nursery.

Oscar and Elaine Gustafson are in their 70s. Though he’s wearing blue overalls, not a red suit, and has left his Santa hat inside, it doesn’t take much imagination to look at Mr. Gustafson, with his bushy white beard, and see Mr. Claus.

“It’s $25 a tree, including sales tax,” he says. “Some people have such a good time, they give us an extra $10. They say it was worth it, it was such a great experience. ... It’s fun out here.”

To explain how they ended up here, in the Christmas-tree business, start with butter.

Oscar Gustafson isn’t related to the local dairy farm family, but did grow up on a farm in New Jersey and has strong memories of being about 8 or 9, getting up every morning at 4 a.m. to milk the cows.

He smiles when he remembers how the cats would line up and wait for him to give them a squirt of warm milk. He does not smile when he recalls the memory of churning the butter.

“Momma put the cream in a big jar,” he said. “I’d sit there for 45 minutes, turning this crank. I hated that job. So I didn’t use any butter .... so I wouldn’t have to do it [again].”

To this day, he says, he doesn’t have a taste for butter.

So when they moved to North Florida to be closer to their two boys and decided to devote some of their land to agricultural use, they weren’t about to get cows or chickens or any other animals.

Christmas trees, they decided, were perfect.

“If we want to go visit someone, we can walk away from these,” he said, pointing to cedars, sand pines and Virginia pines.

A year ago, he had to walk away from them frequently and head to the hospital. Elaine Gustafson was battling cancer. She made it through her treatment and then it was his turn. Now they’re both in good shape.

So this will be a good Christmas, no matter what’s under their trees.

Standing amidst the trees, listening to the birds chirping, he recalled that when he was growing up, his father would go to one corner of their farm and cut a wild cedar tree. His mother would pop some popcorn. Then he and his sister would sit there in the evening with a needle and thread, creating long strings to put on the tree.

This is what Christmas trees do. Not just create memories, but bring them back.

Next stop, Baker County and a place called Rudolph’s, owned by a woman named Fraser.

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Jeanell Fraser, 77, offers a seat in her living room, next to this year’s Christmas tree, cut from the farm outside and beautifully decorated with a collection of Christopher Radko ornaments.

“It’s kind of a Charlie Brown tree,” she says.

It’s hard to imagine anyone else describing her tree this way. But the funny thing is that when she does, you instantly know what she is talking about. It has been 48 years since “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired and America watched — 50 percent of the televisions in the United States were tuned to the CBS broadcast — as Lucy sent Charlie Brown out to get a “big, shiny aluminum tree,” only to see him come back with a small sapling.

These days you can go to Amazon.com and order artificial replicas of a Charlie Brown tree, complete with single ornament, Linus blanket, recorded music and over-commercialization irony. But some people want the real thing.

“We’ve had people call and say, ‘Do you have any Charlie Brown trees? We like to take the tree that nobody else wants and give it a home,’” Fraser says.

She also has had people tell her they saw her trees — you know, the Fraser firs — for sale in town. She laughs and explains that while her last name is spelled the same as the popular Christmas trees, she only wishes all of those were hers.

Fraser firs don’t survive our summers. But she has grown all types of trees at Rudolph’s, including the palms that keep the place running year-’round. These days she has Leyland cypress and red cedar and a few Carolina sapphire on parts of the 123-acre farm about 12 miles north of Glen St. Mary.

She grew up on this land, moved away and then came back with her husband, Ed. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service and, when they were living in Tennessee, some of his co-workers invited him to a Christmas-tree association meeting. That planted the seed, she says. And in 1981, they planted their first trees and “it kind of mushroomed.”

At one point, they had devoted 25 acres to Christmas trees and had tree lots in Jacksonville, Lake City and Lake Butler. Now the farm is strictly choose-and-cut. Her husband died seven years ago. That same year she lost one of her two children, her daughter, and contemplated getting out of the Christmas tree business.

“But I thought, ‘You really need something to do,’” she said, adding with a laugh: “This certainly gives me something to do, sometimes more than I like. But it has helped. ... And now one of the grandsons is interested in taking over.”

This will be good news for the regular customers, such as the family that comes the first weekend after Thanksgiving, sets up a tent and chairs and makes a day of it. Or the four-generation family that was paying for a tree right before we came inside the house.

“Have a merry Christmas,” Fraser said to them. “And we’ll see y’all again next year.”

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Joan Lyons says they definitely will be back.

As her 9-year-old great grandson, Nathan Parish, ran around his father’s red pickup, the freshly cut red cedar in the bed, she recalled what happened last year.

“Ooh, he got mad at me,” Lyons said. “I bought one at the grocery store and brought it home. I haven’t heard the end of it. I don’t think I ever will hear the end of it.”

She called her great grandson over.

“OK, Nathan,” she said. “I was just telling this man about last year’s Christmas tree.”

As if on cue, Nathan froze, his smile disappearing instantly, replaced by a furrowed brow and pursed lips.

“See?” Lyons said with a laugh. “They say a picture is worth a thousand words ...”

I try to get a few words out of Nathan anyway. I ask him what he likes about doing this. Is it the search for the right tree? Cutting it down?

He shrugs. Then his dad tosses out another reason, the one I should have started with, the one that gets to the heart of the potential power, not only of their tree, but of every Christmas tree.

“Or is it that all of us get to do something together?” he says.

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Our Christmas tree routine involves driving about a mile to the tree lot at Hendricks Avenue Elementary that helps support the school’s patrols. Once we make our choice, Jon Singleton, a realtor whose daughter is a fifth-grade patrol, and Jacob Ritchie, a fifth-grade patrol, do all the hard work, getting our Fraser firs wrapped up and strapped to the roof rack of my wife’s Pontiac Vibe. A half hour after we left our house, we’re back home.

I feel a little guilty. It’s almost too easy. There are times when I’m tempted to make it even easier and go the artificial route. Then I think of Dad.

I don’t have many photos of me with my father, mainly because he usually was the one holding the camera. But there is one of him with a tree slung over his shoulder and me, a toddler at the time, walking in front of him, bundled up in a red coat, white mittens and rubber galoshes, both of us smiling.

The photo was taken before we moved to a small town in Wisconsin when I was in sixth grade, the same age my daughter is now. Dad became pastor of Whiting Community Baptist, a church that had an asset that I took for granted at the time: an 80-acre tree farm.

It was about 50 miles away, an easy drive in the summer, when we’d do youth group trips there and I’d sprint through the woods with my friends. In the winter, the drive could be more of a challenge, but inevitably we’d make a family trek there and tromp through the snow in search of a tree.

Dad would try to find the perfect one, straight as a telephone pole and just the right height for our living room. When we got home, we inevitably discovered that the tree was too tall and hooked this way or that.

Although he was a minister, there were some situations — setting up our camper in summer, trying to get a tree to stand up straight — where the frustration resulted in something akin to Ralphie’s dad in “A Christmas Story” fighting with the furnace.

At the time, I thought we went through this routine partly because we could get a tree for free at the church farm. Why else would you do all of that — drive so far, saw down a tree, drag it back to the car, strap it on top, drive home and fight with it — other than to save some money?

Looking back, I don’t even know for sure the trees were free. But even if they were, I’m pretty sure that isn’t why we did it.

Dad loved Christmas trees. They were one of his favorite parts of the holiday. And after the tree was up and decorated, at some point he would put on some Christmas music, lie on the floor near the tree and look up at it.

I used to wonder what he was thinking about. How the tree had looked in the woods? How quickly another year had passed? How, as he often lamented, Christmas got lost in the commercialism? Or how he was just happy to finally relax? Probably all of the above.

At least once he fell asleep right there, snoring loudly.

So when I say that I can’t remember anything that I found under the Christmas tree, that isn’t exactly true.